I write about how technology shapes society, and vice versa. In addition to blogging for Forbes, I cover tech policy for Ars Technica. I'm an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and have a master's degree in computer science from Princeton. I live in Philadelphia with my wife and our two cats. There's more information about me on my website, including a comprehensive disclosure statement. Please follow me on Twitter. You can email me at contact@timothyblee.com. (I don't really like Google+ but I need to put my profile here to show up in Google search results)

The Case Against The Case Against Voting

It’s election day, which means that I’m seeing a healthy trickle of people—invariably my fellow libertarians—declaring their intention not to vote. The exact arguments vary, but this post by Eli Dourado is representative of the genre.

Before getting into the specifics of why I disagree with Eli’s argument, I think it’s helpful to look at the big picture. Over the course of human history, there have been many, many societies with awful systems of government. Virtually every government prior to World War I was cruel and barbaric by modern standards. Even in the last century, most parts of the world have been ruled by kleptocratic tyrants. By world and historical standards, then, we residents of the United States have been blessed with a phenomenally humane and competent system of governance.

This isn’t to say that public policy in the United States is perfect. Far from it. America would be an even better place if we liberalized our drug laws, had a less imperialist foreign policy, brought more choice to our education system, reduced farm subsidies, liberalized our housing markets, lowered taxes, and so forth. But the remarkable thing about our system of government isn’t how much injustice it produces, but how little injustice it causes relative to the political system of almost any other society in the history of the world.

Getting a system like ours to work tolerably well is a huge collective action problem. Most of the tasks involved in running the government are unglamorous and non-lucrative. Many positions of authority in government also present opportunities for dishonest people to “cash in,” for example by accepting bribes and kickbacks. In a nation of strictly self-interested individuals, the honest among us would never volunteer to do these jobs, the dishonest would get all of them, and living in the United States would be like living in a Third World dictatorship.

Fortunately, we’re not a nation of strictly self-interested individuals. We’ve figured out how to solve this collective action by developing strong social norms that encourage civic participation and honesty in government. Thousands of Americans feel a duty to volunteer for those unglamorous, non-lucrative jobs. Most of them do their jobs honestly.

The same point applies to voting. In the aggregate, a well-informed, attentive electorate improves the quality of governance. But a single vote almost never decides the outcome of an election. So if everyone behaved in a narrowly self-interested fashion, we’d wind up with a much worse system of government (since the only people voting would be those who’d been bribed or coerced into doing so) and everyone would suffer.

Luckily, that doesn’t happen because we’ve figured out how to overcome the collective action problem by establishing a strong pro-voting social norm. We remind each other to vote, wear “I voted” stickers to set a good example, and say things like “if you don’t vote, you can’t complain” to shame those who don’t participate. And this works pretty well—a majority of Americans vote even though it would be in their personal self-interest to skip it.

Now here is Eli:

The cause of all these harms is not just that voters make bad choices. That is a narrow perspective. It is that so many domains are subject to collective choice in the first place. The correct response to the question, “Shall we pass a law that destroys the lives of people who use drugs, especially if they are black?” is not merely “No,” but “Take your democracy and shove it.” Merely responding “No” is collectively harmful, because it fails to challenge the implicit proposition that the domain is rightly subject to collective choice.

This ignores what the actual universe of possibilities is. Of course it would be nice if there was a political system that magically removed certain issues from the realm of collective decision-making. But no such system exists, or is likely to ever exist. After thousands of years of political experimentation, it seems pretty clear that some institution is always going to have a monopoly of force, and some human being or group of human beings is going to have the ultimate authority over how that force is used. We have strong evidence that the best (or least-bad) option is to disperse that authority as widely as possible through an election open to the general public.

Letting your personal revulsion at the bad things your government does deter you from voting is an error exactly analogous to the pacifist who refuses to take up arms when faced with a hostile invading army. Obviously, it would be nice if you could persuade the world’s aggressors to voluntarily renounce violence. But in the real world, the only thing that stops a violent aggressor is a willingness to use deadly force for defensive purposes.

The pacifist stance is only viable when one lives in a society with others who are willing to take up arms in self-defense. Likewise, “principled” non-voters have the luxury of not participating in the political process because millions of others are doing the hard work of making democracy work, thereby staving off the much larger injustices that tend to occur in non-democratic political systems. We’re a wealthy and peaceful society, so we can tolerate a large number of such freeloaders. But there’s nothing virtuous about refusing to do your part.

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OK, either you or Gary Johnson have convinced me; I’ll be voting this evening.

I find the “norms” or “habits” argument compelling. Despite what Democratic Party folks argue, the polity is comprised more of the actions of the populace than those of the government. There are numerous constitutions around the world copied directly from ours, or from the common laws of England in the context of which our Constitution was written. However, few enough of those constitutions serve societies as free or prosperous as ours. The nation is not its documents, but rather it is the people and their actions.

After all, we had the Bill of Rights two centuries ago, and yet multitudes still lived in slavery. We ended slavery, and then another century passed before the descendants of slaves were accorded the full benefits of their citizenship under the law. If the Founding Fathers created anything we should respect, it was not law, but a foundation upon which law might be improved. Those improvements have not been in the documents of the law primarily, but in the hearts, minds, and actions of the citizens. Voting is an important part of that.

All of which is really just a long-winded way of saying that your, “…no such system [of laws limited in scope] exists, or is likely to ever exist. After thousands of years of political experimentation, it seems pretty clear that some institution is always going to have a monopoly of force” statements are really out of place here. Thousands of years? What happened between the Roman Republic and the Althingi? Between that and the Magna Carta? Between that and the Enlightenment? It seems to me that we’re just getting started. This “end of history” proposition is just as wrong today as it would have been in 1789. Our civic habits don’t change quickly, but at least in this nation they do change. If Libertarianism cannot accommodate further improvements in the ethical norms of this nation, be sure that some other philosophy can.

I’m glad you’ll be voting! I don’t understand the rest of your comment. I don’t think I made an “end of history” argument, or suggested that our institutions can’t improve. Obviously, we’ve found clever ways to induce governments not to abuse our freedoms, and that’s great. But these controls (bill of rights, checks and balances, etc) only limit collective power in the short run. In the long run, if the public wants a more powerful government it will get it.

You were responding, however, to the claim that the majority shouldn’t violently destroy the lives of those who take drugs. You seem to claim that it will always be the majority’s option to do that. (It might be more accurate to say that political power is power over other humans, whether that is held by a majority, a minority, or an omnipotent ruler.) I say a polity that is improving in an ethical sense may be expected to continue to improve, whatever the voting rules may be. We don’t violently destroy those who have particular idiosyncratic religious beliefs, even though many societies have. In this nation, that option really is off the table, even for the majority.

The “powerful government” bit is a red herring. These issues are related to the power and size of government, but there is no equivalence between the concepts. Sweden spends more on public services than the USA, and happily (for them) those services don’t include a perpetual war on minority communities.

I see. My point is just that the only way we’re going to get the government to stop ruining the lives of drug users is by making a collective democratic decision to stop doing so. We might do it in a way that constrains future majorities, but there’s no way for it to happen other than via the democratic process.